Today, we’re presenting the third episode of our mini-series about the heroes and anti-heroes of the White emigration. It focuses on France and Paris, the latter of which became the capital of “outer Russia” in the 1920s.
How did Russian emigrants earn money and entertain themselves in Paris? How did Hitler’s attack on the USSR divide the emigrants and what happened to them in 1946, when Stalin promised to pardon all White emigrant returnees? What does the life of their Russian-French descendants look like now? The final episode of the docu-series is already up on the channel!



Contents:

00:00 The series finale about the White emigrants in Paris
04:45 Why were there so many emigrants in France?
05:35 What jobs did Russian emigrants have in Paris?
10:13 On the princes who became taxi drivers
15:45 How did the Lopukhins emigrate?
16:45 The governor of Paris. How was French bureaucracy tackled a hundred years ago?
22:45 Bunin in France
25:50 The main Russian district in Paris
29:57 The Russian emigration’s primary publication
32:35 Kuprin’s failed emigration

34:40 The actress Kisa Kuprina
39:30 The Orthodox cathedral in Nice which the ROC is trying to take possession of
47:30 How Ehrenburg glorified the USSR in Macron’s favorite cafe
50:25 The story of Count Sheremetyev’s son
53:15 Emigrants’ double life
55:13 Nadezhda Plevitskaya’s romantic song is a Russian emigration anthem
1:00:20 Was she involved in the kidnapping of General Kutepov?
1:05:30 What about General Miller’s kidnapping?
1:11:04 Nikolay Skoblin exposed
1:15:06 Plevitskaya’s note for the Soviet secret services
1:21:55 How did her story end?
1:25:00 The story of a Russian emigrant who assassinated the French president
1:29:30 Ivan Bunin’s love triangle
1:34:57 He was the first Russian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize!
1:39:00 How did Bunin spend a million dollars in 2 years?
1:42:45 The keeper of Bunin’s secret archive
1:49:30 How did Nabokov make his way to France?
1:54:15 Tsvetaeva’s return and her suicide
2:01:19 How many emigrants ultimately returned to the Soviet Union?
2:04:55 France under Nazi occupation
2:08:20 The Russians at the heart of the Resistance movement
2:11:20 The rift between Russian emigrants on June 22, 1941
2:15:45 The story of an escape from Berlin
2:17:45 Nabokov’s brother died in a concentration camp
2:20:15 Which Russian emigrants supported Hitler?
2:30:00 How did the Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH hunt down Russian emigrants?
2:36:50 In 1946, Stalin called on the emigrants to return
2:41:00 Bunin wrote to Stalin: “I’d like to go back”, but he never did. Why?
2:43:30 Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, France’s main Russian cemetery
2:48:15 Did the Russian emigrants of the first wave miss Russia?
2:51:35 Does that emigration really have that much in common with the current one?